Cyndi Lauper yelled at me

I once sat across the table from Dinah Shore when she asked if she could take a bite from my Reuben. (Confession: I used to eat meat back in the day.) And David Copperfield once invited me on stage to assist in an illusion.

This was bigger, huge, a bonding for the ages.

It happened last night, when Cyndi Lauper performed "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" as one of her five encore songs at the Sovereign Performing Arts Center, a fantastic show, the best ever according to me wife and my friend, the great Carrie Fink Fritz. We had second-row seats, and Cyndi worked the crowd by stomping into the fan zone, telling the ushers she didn't want them near the stage steps to impede her, moving people from their chairs so she could stand aloft. Some gal came roaring down near the stage a song or two before, during "What's Going On," wailing about a disturbance nearby, and all the security forces congregated backward (what's going on?), giving an opening for two dozen fans or so to bum-rush the stage, capturing the concert's final moments on camera.

Then there she was, Cyndi, standing on a seat two seats away, so close you could touch her push-up bra, and my iPhone camera was archiving the performance, and she yelled whispered softly, not into the mic, an admonition that I didn't get it all down. I heard the word "money." Maybe she thought my little video would eat into profits for her concert DVD, on sale in the lobby. (Dirt cheap at $15, compared to the $50 hoodies.) Maybe she threatened to take my camera and crush it like Captain Lou Albano might have. (Dr. John, the opener, could play that role.) OK money changes everything. But I am ultra-polite. I stopped videoing. I stood there, admiring her alabaster skin. And her energy. And her Bwooklyn chutzpah.

I didn't post the clip on Facebook until I got home.